Customer relationship management (“CRM”) systems allow businesses to manage the relationships with their customers, including the capture, storage, and analysis of customer information. Some types of CRM applications are hosted on a remote computer system and offered to subscribers as a service. Subscribers to such a hosted CRM service can utilize the hosted CRM application to manage the relationships with their customers. In many CRM systems, electronic mail (“e-mail”) is the preferred method of communicating with customers.
When communicating with customers through a CRM system via e-mail, it is desirable for e-mail messages to be submitted for delivery directly from the CRM subscriber's e-mail system rather than from the CRM system itself. In fact, ensuring that e-mails are sent from the subscriber's e-mail system rather than from the CRM system is often necessary because only the subscriber's e-mail system has rights to submit e-mail messages for delivery from the intended simple mail transfer protocol (“SMTP”) domain. Moreover, ensuring that e-mail messages are sent from the subscriber's e-mail system protects the CRM system from issues related to large, dangerous, illegal, and voluminous e-mail messages. This also allows the subscriber to maintain their local e-mail quotas, policies, and archiving rules with respect to CRM-related e-mail messages.
In many CRM installations, such as where the CRM application is hosted at a remote computing system, the subscriber's e-mail system is outside the control of the CRM system because it executes remotely. The subscriber's e-mail system may also be protected by a firewall or other network security device or require credentials for access. In these scenarios, previous CRM systems have relied on e-mail “spoofing,” also referred to as “send-impersonation,” to create the appearance that CRM-related e-mail messages are being transmitted from the subscriber's e-mail system. E-mail spoofing refers to the process of altering the sender address and possibly other parts of an e-mail header to cause an e-mail to appear as if it originated from a different source. Through the use of spoofing, a message sent from a CRM system can appear as if it was sent from a subscriber's mail system.
The use of spoofing to send CRM-related e-mail messages is problematic, however, because many e-mail systems identify spoofed e-mail messages as unsolicited bulk e-mail (“UBE”). As a result, these types of messages are often quarantined or deleted prior to reaching their intended recipient. Because a CRM subscriber's relationships with its customers are so valuable, the possibility that CRM-related e-mail messages may be identified as UBE and not delivered to a customer is highly undesirable. Moreover, send-impersonation bypasses all of the controls set for the sender's e-mail system, such as policies and quotas. For example, a company may require that a legal disclaimer be appended to all send e-mails. However, send-impersonation will bypass the e-mail system and cause the disclaimer not to be appended.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is provided.